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Cognitive Shock Treatment - A Reflection 10 Years On

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Image credit: affen ajlfe, Flickr In June of 2008, I had the dubious distinction of being featured in a blog piece called " Torah and Relativity: Attack of the Jewish Cranks ," penned by Mark Chu-Carroll, a PhD computer scientist. It went through an essay I'd recently posted online in which I speculated that seemingly miraculous phenomena attested to in Solomon's Temple, such as the center-most lamp of the Menorah staying lit all day, the Showbread staying warm for a week, and the Ark fitting in the Holy of Holies despite its staves being too long to fit, could be explained by way of Special and General Relativity. In Chu-Carroll's essay, my ideas were taken to task and I was roundly mocked. What I want to do here in this reflection is two things: 1) highlight where exactly I went wrong in my thinking, and 2) talk about the role of mockery in critique. When Cognitive Bias Leads to Far-Fetched Explanations Let's start with this one: Mr. Bar-Cohn